To Read Makes Our Speaking English Good

"I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother�s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage." (pg. 1, "The Bloody Chamber")

*Swoon.* I might have to update my list of favorite authors. 

I have finally been able to start in on my birthday present from K, a fabulous art historian and fangirl of all things fairy tale related. This year, she gave me a copy of The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, a collection of short stories that explore the menacing undertones of several classic fairy tales. She covers Beauty and the Beast, Puss-in-Boots, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and several other traditional "princess" stories. But it�s the story "The Bloody Chamber" that is truly haunting. A retelling of Bluebeard, the story is set in vaguely Edwardian times (sometime c. 1910-1925) and features the first-person narration of a 17 year old bride who has recently wed an extremely wealthy man many years her senior. All of the same classic elements of the story are there: he takes her to his castle in the absolute middle of nowhere, hastily gives her all of the keys to his house as he runs out on "business," tells her that she can explore any room except one (the one where he goes to "savour the rare pleasure of imagining [himself] wifeless"), she searches the house, and finds his special room which turns out to be a bloody torture chamber containing two embalmed ex-wives and third very recently murdered wife with fresh wounds from an Iron Maiden. What makes Carter's retelling special is that, unlike many heroines, the young girl knows immediately that she has been set up. Not only in her specific circumstance--being trapped in the security of an advantageous marriage and isolated in a secluded castle with a predator--but also on a meta level as a young girl who exists on a that paradoxical pedestal of patriarchal sexual schizophrenia where her most valuable asset in securing a husband is her youth and maidenhood, the two things which must be relinquished in marriage. After finding the chamber and upon hearing the imminence of her husband�s return, the unnamed heroine realizes:

"I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had med that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora�s box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at a charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner." (pg. 34, "The Bloody Chamber")

She was never supposed to win. And yet she does. Her mother (not her brothers, as is told in the traditional version) arrives at the castle unbidden and barely stops him from beheading her daughter, offering only this as an explanation for her intuitive reception of a daughter�s plight: "I've never heard you cry before." Carter understands that there are few words sufficient enough to explain a feminine bond that transcends distance and, occasionally, even time, and yet she recognizes that bond as a force for good, a force for action and salvation that is not to be dismissed for lack of logical, rational, or scientific "proof."

On a more cerebral level, what I love most about "The Bloody Chamber" is that the language switches so quickly from amazingly erotic ("my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow") to chillingly ominous ("tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness"). That, and the fact that Carter�s collection of stories paved the way for Neil Gaiman�s Smoke and Mirrors, particularly with regards to the Snow White story. Yes, I'm a shameless vampire fangirl and I admit that I love Gaiman�s short story "Snow, Glass, Apples." So I guess the point of this ramble is that I highly recommend The Bloody Chamber to anyone with an interest in stories of deceptively whimsical malice, which is of course the bread-and-butter of the Gothic novel and apparently still thriving.